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But who is it exactly who has
portrayed Haiti that way? The New York Times, the Chicago
Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and so
many, many others, including all the major American television news networks—obviously
with occasional exceptional, brilliant reporting. But really, they are the ones
who have “labeled” Haiti “a disaster.” Why not say so in this series? Otherwise,
so many people who don’t know better and who aren’t reading the critiques on
Twitter will be left with the impression given by the Times that it is
only their work for this package that has finally shown “how much of Haiti’s
misery has been brought on by the outside world—and how often intervention
has been portrayed as a helping hand.” My inbox is full of notes from friends and
family asking, breathlessly, “Did you see The New York Times’ expose
about the French debt?” But it’s not a scoop and it’s not an expose, it’s a
summary of so many years of work by scholars, historians, archivists, and
economists, Haitian and other, and then a deep dive by the Times into French
and other archives and research resources.
All over social media, the Times’
series has sparked complaints about the many who helped the Times who
are not mentioned in the credits or cited in the pieces. But that’s minor. This
is how journalism works, whether those sources like it or not. Reporters talk
to as many people as they can for a story like this, and they do all sorts of
reading and research, and then they cite the most important sources and the
ones who gave them the best quotes, and they’re careful not to plagiarize.
What’s more important are the bits
of big news the Times story did reveal, and for the first time. As my
colleague Jonathan Katz points out in his Substack feed, The Racket, the
Times for the first time documented the precise amount Haiti ended up paying
over time to France, French plantation owners, French banks, and, later,
American banks. It pointed out that the Haitians’ debt payments effectively funded
fr the construction of one of the great symbols of French liberty, the Eiffel
Tower. Another fact: Although the Haitian payments were supposed to go to
former owners of property in Haiti, France itself put some of the money in the
state’s own coffers. So did officials of the National City Bank, who controlled
Haiti’s debts in part of the 1900s, and
paid themselves handsome salaries out of those monies, as the Times
reporting documents for the first time.
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